


superfriends

by quietnight, silentwalrus



Series: farm hell [2]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Farm Hell 2: Off The Farm, Froggy the Cat, Gen, M/M, do not copy to another site
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-06 23:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19072654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight, https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: Steve had gotten himself reinstated to active duty, re-appointed head of ops at SHIELD - such as it was - and got the pins taken out of his leg in the span of eight days, during which Natasha explained the existence of Bucky to various alphabet agencies with papers that show him to be Yakov Korin, her Russian-Israeli “contractor friend”. Natasha buried the most damning evidence of his participation in the coup, and Rhodes and Hill need the extra manpower enough to cover for them without asking too many questions.





	superfriends

**Author's Note:**

> The first of the farm hell sequelets! THANK YOU AGGRESSIVEWHENSTARTLED AND QUIETNIGHT AS ALWAYS FOR YOUR HEROIC SERVICES
> 
> title chosen last minute entirely by my last brain cell and the itunes shuffle function aka from superfriends by zhu

Steve had gotten himself reinstated to active duty, re-appointed head of ops at SHIELD - such as it was - and got the pins taken out of his leg in the span of eight days, during which Natasha explained the existence of Bucky to various alphabet agencies with papers that show him to be Yakov Korin **,** her Russian-Israeli “contractor friend”. Natasha buried the most damning evidence of his participation in the coup, and Rhodes and Hill need the extra manpower enough to cover for them without asking too many questions.

Bucky is cooperating enough that whenever anybody looks at him too long he starts cursing them out in Hebrew. The consensus, according to Sam, is that he’s Natasha’s ex-Mossad ex-boyfriend.

Steve has to set aside a lot of things, like asking Natasha what happened between her and Fury and the fact that Bucky apparently speaks Hebrew, because getting himself reinstated in the very center of the shitshow that is the United States entire intelligence apparatus is taking up all of his time, sanity and patience. There are practicals that can’t be avoided, like calling Luann and asking her if she knows anyone who’d like a bootleg cow and moving back into his old apartment with Sam. Digging up some clothes that aren’t A-frames or overalls is a necessity for all the meetings he’s got to get to, even when it turns out the only pair of pants that fit over the surgical dressings on his knee are his old Captain America kevlars. He isn’t showing up to meet with the SecDef in shorts, so he says fuck it and adds a black tac undershirt on top and hits all the meetings that way. He got given a cheap aluminum cane for the day after the surgery, too, but he tosses that after using it to make a point to the director of the DHS. It was pretty much unusable after being bent into a pretzel like that.

The director doesn’t like him - Steve doesn’t often endear himself to his chain of command, let alone any Capitol Hill chump outside of it - but he and the others can’t do shit without inviting Steve to steamroll them and they know it. It’s got its drawbacks. Steve sometimes wishes he could go back to when everyone outside SHIELD - and most within it - thought him a point-and-deploy grunt, because it let him get away with a _lot_ more when he went against orders or decided to invent his own and nobody suspected him of _any_ kind of machination. These days they know to watch their backs for him, which generally means if he wants to push something he has to brute force the issue.

Unfortunately for them, Steve is pretty much always willing to brute force the issue.

Tony’s there too, in his usual pinball way, bouncing in and out and seriously inconveniencing anyone who runs into him. Steve had the dubious pleasure of first meeting Tony at Peggy’s eighty-fifth birthday party, where at first he thought Tony was one of those guys who thought that just by being Captain America Steve was issuing some kind of dick-swinging challenge and tried to haze him for it in order to reestablish whatever internal equilibrium Steve upset simply by existing. He was loud, skittery and hostile in the kind of way that meant it was more or less his only social defensive system when just being a billionaire didn’t work.

And Tony is that guy, to an extent. He’s just not _only_ that guy. Thank god Peg was there to smack their heads together, because at the time Steve could only react to with frosty stonewalling; Peggy had rolled up and demanded to know who put a fork up his ass, and to Steve’s shock the question had been directed at Tony, not him. They’d all gotten along much better when Steve realized Tony was essentially Peg’s idiot nephew and Tony realized Steve’s greatest goal at that party was to find a combination of semi-legal ‘medication’ and top shelf alcohol to actually let him feel drunk.

And then they had the Iron Man thing, and then the Chitauri invasion, and since Peg passed the idiot nephew-having got more or less transferred to Steve, so these days Tony is like family.

Exactly like family, really. He catches sight of Steve going down the hall to his ninth meeting of the day, dashes over in his patented Stark cross between scuttle and strut and grabs Steve’s elbow, eyes blazing. “Steve-o! Still got two legs, good, great, great to see you up again, I’ve got some  -”

Unfortunately for everyone, Steve’s got no patience left to do anything but cut to the quick. “Why didn’t you tell me? When you called?”

“What?”

“The _nazis,_ Tony. When you called me, at my safehouse, to laugh about bare bears.”  

Tony actually takes a step back. “I thought you knew,” he says, frowning.

Steve cocks his head. “So you called just to chat? No mention of hey, Steve, how ‘bout them Nazis?”

Tony meets his eyes, his mobile face gone stilled and sober. “I was there when when we dug you out of that building, Cap,” he says. “You looked, and I am not exaggerating, like raw hamburger in a kevlar sausage coating. You probably shouldn’t be walking on that leg at all right now, you’re what, fifteen minutes post-op? Anyway. You were recuperating. And I wasn’t about to rub it in that you couldn’t be out there ruining lives with Romanova.”

Steve considers him. Even if Tony’s lying about this, he doesn’t actually doubt whether they’re on the same side - Tony would need either much smarter or much stupider motivation than ‘world domination’ or ‘remove the undesirables’ in order to back genocide. “In the future,” Steve says, “you can spare a little less consideration for my feelings.”

“Forgive me for assuming your usual omniscience,” Tony fires back, but his face is softening and he’s bouncing on his heels again. “I thought between Hill going to ground and you having your mobile control center that you were all handling it business as usual, just with an additional backdrop of cows. You’d be _my_ first stop on counter-coup anti-fascist strategizing.”

“I was retired,” Steve reminds him. “And Natasha doesn’t tell me everything.”

“Romanova tells you shit she doesn’t even tell Fury, and that girl isn’t just good, she’s psychic. And you’re back in it now, unless I’m sorely mistaken and you’re just here because you got lost on your way to the senior community living center.”

“I’m back,” Steve admits. “For now.”

Tony steps in, squinting at Steve’s face, scrutinizing, then back again. “You’re pissed,” he observes.

“Sure am,” Steve allows dryly.  

“Why?”

“It got personal.”

Tony jerks his head towards the suite of conference rooms behind them. “What, these guys? No, not these guys - what, the nazis?”

“Yes, Tony,” Steve says. “The nazis.”

“Right, right, right, with the whole, like, dying for the cause, right, yeah, right,” Tony says, as allergic to any discussions of Steve’s wartime years as he’s ever been. “You’re back in it? You’re back in it. Good, great. Anyway, here, you need better security than whatever this clown shop is cranking on. Slap these on your paper files and run this on all your tech, thank me later, you know how to file bug reports. Bye.”

What Tony handed him turns out to be a flashdrive and a packet of thick stickers that all say TOP SECRET on them. They look like they came from a little kid’s action figure set, but upon examination it actually has a thumbprint scanner. Steve, upon testing one on his junk mail, discovers that the security precaution is “set the contents on fire”.

Steve sighs and tosses the lot on the kitchen table. Tony always throws him these spy things he makes when people let him watch Bond movies and it's a shame and a fire hazard to let them just sit in a drawer, so he’ll probably end up giving them to Natasha. He’s not sure these will do much good as actual paper file security, but she can definitely put them to use as a means of sabotage.   

There’s a faint scuff of a foot, and Steve glances up from smothering the flames of the burning junk mail to see Bucky’s glower jerk and disappear back around the corner down the hallway. Since being introduced to Maria and Sharon and Rhodes he’s been twice as skittish and just as stiff as when Steve met him, speaking almost never and holding himself rigid and apart. Steve’s tried to keep as much constant as he could, making sure they stick to the antibiotic routine of the injured cat - currently lurking resentfully with its fellow ferals in the office room of the apartment - but it hasn’t seemed to help much.

Bucky lurks in the apartment just as resentfully. The spare room is his now, for the duration; it had been Natasha’s when she lived there. As a result the walls are still virulently pink, the bed can only be described as frou-frou and the ceiling is plastered edge to edge with stickers of flowers and rainbows and glow in the dark stars. The bedspread is Hello Kitty. It’s subtle, but here and there Natasha’s embroidered over some of the little pictures to give the mouthless staring cartoon a knife or rifle or a very tiny set of brass knuckles.

Bucky stopped dead when he saw it. “It was Natasha’s,” Steve explained, keeping his voice light. “And I haven’t been able to get the stickers off.”

Of course, he hadn’t tried very hard. Besides, he’ll never throw away that bedspread. Some of those little embroidered rifles are incredibly detailed works of art.

Bucky clenched his jaw, stomped in across the fuschia carpet and threw down his single bag of possessions onto the bedspread. It was pretty impressive: it’s hard to stomp while also looking like you’re trying not to touch the floor you’re walking on. Honestly, with that kind of performance, Steve really couldn’t be blamed for buying him a full set of sheets and new coverlet the next day, one patterned in cheerful cows and the other in leafy strawberries and flowers.

Bucky hasn’t gotten him back for that yet, but Steve’s also been out of the house for eighteen hours a day ever since and is tired enough not to notice if at some point Buck replaced his toothpaste with crisco or something. And Buck might not have had a chance to in any case; Steve’s sharing the main bedroom with Sam, because the bed’s big enough and it’s frankly Sam’s bedroom at this point anyway. Steve’s gonna have to find a place for himself and Bucky soon, because while Sam is still perfectly civil to Bucky Steve can tell it’s not exactly relaxing for him to live in the same space as a guy who tried - apparently with great enthusiasm and very near total success - to super duper kill him.

So things have been pretty quiet. Sam’s in meetings only a little less than Steve is - whenever they get to be in the same ones it’s a blessing, but Sam’s mainly with the other flyguys led by Colonel Rhodes doing various airborne recon and retrieval things - so Steve does his best to make sure Bucky is eating by having daily groceries delivered. It’s far from ideal; Steve should be there for Bucky, with Bucky, but the world doesn’t wait and Steve’s learned the hard way that if he doesn’t go out and get a hand on the reins then someone else will get the reins on him.

The perishables are all either gone or in the fridge when he comes home, at least, and no delivery people have been murdered yet, so he’s gotta assume calories are being consumed. Hopefully not just by the cats.

Then on the ninth day he comes home to a shattering crash from the kitchen. He pelts down the hall with his jacket half off, skidding to a stop in the doorway. Bucky - for some reason once again in nothing but his bloomers - and Froggy, currently covered in aromatic olive oil - are both skittered back against the cabinets, Bucky’s arm clamped around the cat, both staring frozen at him with remarkably similar expressions. “What,” Steve starts to say, only this breaks the frozen spell and both man and beast make desperate leaps for freedom around Steve in the doorway.

Steve catches them midair in either arm, immediately adding a quart of extra virgin cold pressed to his current outfit. “Do I even want to know,” he says resignedly; Froggy starts struggling, so Steve shifts them around until he can stick the cat in Bucky’s arms. “Hold him. No, you can’t get down, there’s broken glass and oil everywhere and you’re barefoot. What happened?”

This approach gets him nothing but oily, sullen silence, so Steve figures he might as well talk himself while he gets out the broom and starts cleaning up one-handed. Bucky’s a solid if slippery weight under his arm, warm and tense and clearly unwilling to give in to the indignity of putting up a struggle. “Bessie’s been taken in by LuAnn from the library, you’ll be glad to know,” Steve remarks. “The chickens too. If you were trying to deep-fry a cat, we can send them all to go live with her instead. She’s got room for a few more animals, probably.”

 _“Fry him?”_ Bucky demands, in tones remarkably close to horror.

“What were you doing with the oil, then?”

_“Nothing!”_

“Good. If you were going to cook the cats I can’t imagine why you’d start with Froggy.” Glass crunches under Steve’s boots as he corrals the shards into a corner. “If I put you down on the counter, will you stay put and not go tracking oil and cat hair all over the place?”

“I’m not _stupid,”_ Bucky growls.

“Thank god. Can you wash Froggy in the sink? I’ll go get you some shoes.”

Froggy, upon being deposited into a sinkful of warm water, calms right down and starts purring like the degenerate he is. The same cannot be said for Bucky, who rubs halfheartedly at Froggy’s fur while perched on the counter like a very muscular stickbug. Steve can’t help but notice that the bloomers, made of elderly if well-cared-for fabric to begin with, are now mostly transparent due to the combination of oil and sudsy splashback from the sink.

It probably wouldn’t be the most tactically advantageous move to point this out directly. There’s still broken glass on the floor, and, well - he’d woken up with Buck’s hand in his pants that one time, only he hadn’t known Soldier was Bucky then, and - well. He probably wouldn’t have reacted _differently_ if he’d known it was Bucky, but he definitely would’ve _thought_ about it more afterwards.

Bucky’s handsome, still, even with a scarred, frowning face and wearing possibly the exact polar opposite of sexually enticing underwear. They really haven’t had the time to just - talk, between the meetings and Steve’s surgery and getting back to DC, and god knows they have things to talk about. He’s got no idea how much Bucky remembers, how he feels about it - well, clearly he’s pretty damn mad, but that can’t be all. There’s so much Steve wants to ask him.  

Looking at Bucky now, while distantly appalled to find that the glimpse of glutes through damp cotton is, in fact, kinda doing it for him, Steve mostly feels that Buck is too far away. He wants to run a hand down Buck’s back. He wants Bucky to look at him.

Bucky, trying somewhat ineffectively to rub the oil off of Froggy’s ear with his metal hand, is not even sneaking glances at Steve, the way he usually did when they were doing anything in close proximity on the farm. He doesn’t look very happy. He doesn’t look his usual three seconds away from committing arson, though, either, which is frankly more concerning. There hasn’t been a single death threat or scrap paper Steve effigy anywhere.

Well, it’s not like Steve’s never poked a sleeping snake with a stick. “Boycotting clothes again?”

Bucky sneers a little but doesn’t look away from Froggy’s spa experience. “Too hot.”

“You can turn the AC on, champ,” Steve says, genuinely wondering if Bucky really has just been sitting in his room all day and only creeping out after dark, with nobody else home. He hadn’t shown any compunction about prowling where he liked on the farm, but maybe in the city it’s different. “We can cover a higher power bill.”

“Wilson put an angry face on the temperature controls.”

Steve pauses, then takes two steps over to the thermostat where there is, indeed, a sticky note with a frowny face taped over the buttons. Then he casts a glance over at the kitchen. If Bucky _had_ retaliated for the cow sheets but accidentally got Sam instead of Steve, then god alone knows what kind of covert warfare has been happening in here. “What _were_ you doing with the cooking oil?”

 _“Nothing,”_ Bucky stresses. “The cat was on the counter. I was _reaching over_ to get him _off_ the counter when you _opened the door and scared him.”_

“Ah,” Steve says. “Right. You and Sam haven’t been trying to kill each other while I’m not here, have you?”

_“No.”_

“Just checking.” Steve goes back to the sink, gathering up the few shards of glass on the kitchen counter. “Sam’s a great guy, you know. When you’re not trying to kill him.”

This finally makes Bucky give Steve a narrow-eyed stare. Steve tries a smile when it becomes clear that Bucky’s not interested in replying to that particular statement. “Do anything fun today?’

Bucky’s eyes narrow further. “No tails on you,” he says. “Or Wilson. No lojacking on the car. Or the motorcycle. Or clothing.”

Steve pauses as he considers the implication of Bucky rifling through their wardrobes and decides that Sam would not benefit from knowing this information. “Good,” he ventures.

“You shouldn’t go to the The Coarser Grind.”

“The place across the street?” Steve pauses again, more implications multiplying in his forebrain. “Why?” he asks, as delicately as possible.

“The employees are watching you.”

Steve blinks. “Watching me?”

“They watch your front door. They saw me walk out with you. They asked about your leg. They asked me why you didn’t come in for your latte.”

Steve blinks some more. “Did you… tell them…?”

Bucky gives him a look that says he’s trying very hard to forgive him for being so stupid. “My cover does not speak English to civilians.”

“Right,” Steve says slowly. “Just to make sure, you’re talking about Theo and Andre, yes? The guys who run that place? One’s elbow high, the other one with hair in eight colors?”

Bucky’s eyes are narrowed to slits. “You have a predictable routine, a regular order, and your front door is directly across from a public cafe.”

Steve brightens. “Oh, hey, yeah, we need to get ourselves a place.”

“It is _pathetically_ easy to kill y- what?”

“We need our own place,” Steve explains, the idea clicking into being. He’s a genius. “This is Sam’s apartment now, really, and frankly I want to go back to Brooklyn. It’s too easy for politicians to get ahold of me here. Can you find us somewhere?”

“What?”

“It’ll be fine. You don’t need to speak English to get an apartment in New York.”

“New York,” Bucky repeats.

“Yeah. We’re going to be running ops, probably by next week if nobody else on the hill gets their panties in a twist, but with a quinjet it really doesn’t matter where we’re based out of.” Steve smiles at Bucky. “And this way you can find us a place with eight exit routes and no sightlines whatsoever.”

Bucky eyes him suspiciously for a long minute. “Fine.”

“You can do it?”

“Of course I can fucking do it,” Bucky says. He watches Steve a second more. “What about the cats.”

“They can have a room each, if you like.”

Bucky looks down, where Froggy has been industriously massaging his face against Buck’s hand for the past five minutes. “Fine.”

“Fine,” Steve agrees, letting himself grin quietly as he turns away to dump the rest of broken glass in the trashcan.

-o-

Steve meets with Natasha the next morning. “So?” she says.

“I’ve been greenlit to head a strike team,” Steve tells her. “We report to Colonel Rhodes. We have a week to get personnel and gear together and then we’re on call.”

“Can we have Sam?” Natasha says.

Steve slides her his phone, open on his text chain with Rhodes where he’s waiting on a reply. “If the Colonel is feeling generous.”

Natasha nods in approval. “Sharon? Bobbi?”

“I figured you’d want to ask them,” Steve says. “You want Clint?”

Natasha settles back into her seat, openly contemplative. “Maybe later,” she says. “No real need for a second sniper.”

“You want Bucky,” Steve says, just to make sure.

Natasha flashes him a smile. “Oh, definitely,” she says. “He’s very good, and we need him close. It doesn’t help to keep him cooped up in the apartment all day,” she adds, a trace of reproach in her voice.

Steve rolls his eyes. “I don’t bar the door when I go out. He’s keeping himself in there. Besides, you don’t have to tell _me._ I’d like to get my security deposit back one day and he’s started making his own entertainment.”

“Oh?”

Steve sighs. “Don’t ask.”

“You should go spar some,” Natasha says. “Get a feel for each other.” She somehow manages to make it sound untoward with absolutely no audible innuendo in her tone. Natasha found Steve’s recounting of finding Bucky in his bed with a hand down his pants _hilarious,_ which is why Steve’s not telling her about the ‘naked save for underdrawers, avec olive oil’ situation. “Take him to the private gym and start training again. I’ll bring us Sharon and Bobbi, we’ll get Sam, it’ll be a party.”

“You just want to watch Bucky kick my ass,” Steve says good-naturedly.   

“You going to let him?” Natasha says archly.

Steve scratches his chin and squints at the sky; they’re outside at the Navy Memorial, sitting on stone benches. “Dunno. Depends on if he wears those bloomers.”

“Sounds like I’m not the only one who wants Bucky,” Natasha says happily.

Steve gives her a look. “You just love to live dangerously, don’t you.”

“Not as much as you,” Natasha says with the very sweetest of her many smiles. “I can’t _wait_ to see _aaaaaaall_ of this go down.”

The _aaaaaaall_ is accompanied by several increasingly arcane hand motions. Steve sighs as he takes his phone back and pockets it, standing up. “Keep that up and I’ll start charging you the standard Comcast package for cable,” he warns.  

“Worth every penny,” Natasha says smugly, falling in step as they walk back to the Hill.


End file.
